Canadian Review of Sociology-Revue Canadienne De Sociologie最新文献

In January 2020, Ukrainian Flight PS752 was shot down shortly after take-off from Tehran's IKA airport, killing all 176 passengers, the majority of whom were headed to Canada via connecting flights. In the aftermath of the tragedy, many among the Iranian diaspora in Canada, ourselves included, were stricken by an unexpectedly deep sense of shock and sorrow, to the point that some experienced what we term as "vicarious death." Drawing on 49 in-depth interviews with the Iranian diaspora in Edmonton, this study explores questions about how being an immigrant, being far from "Home," and being a member of a racialized group might shape and deepen the experience of collective grief and how, conversely, collective grief might influence the meaning of "Home" and bring into question one's ethno-national self-identity. Our results present a multi-dimensional, sociological understanding of grief as a collective, rather than individualistic, experience and highlight the complexity and depth of emotional experiences among immigrants.

Mainstream practices for producing meat, eggs, and dairy raise numerous concerns regarding public health, animal welfare, and environmental integrity. However, governments worldwide have expanded anti-whistleblower legislation that constrains informed public debate. Since 2019, several Canadian provinces have adopted so-called "ag-gag" laws designed to prevent hidden-camera investigations on farms and meat processing facilities. How do governments across Canada justify ag-gag laws as serving the public interest? To what extent do agricultural industry interests shape government adoption of ag-gag laws? Using Freedom of Information requests and debate records from provincial legislatures, we find that biosecurity is the most prominent justification for ag-gag laws, and that governments exhibit a close, collaborative relationship with industry actors. This case demonstrates that when it comes to contested sites of capital accumulation, governments are drawing on new spatial-legal tools to protect the status quo interests of private industry by dissuading dissent, debate, and public scrutiny.

Following Viviana Zelizer's extensive scholarship on the interweaving of money and intimacy, this paper discusses the often overlooked yet critical role of affect in the production of relational work and in the success of relational packages. Drawing from the results of a grounded-theory-driven research study on sugar dating, the motions through which affect seeps through and structures negotiations of payments and emotional attachment are explored. The paper discusses the management of feelings as a component of relational work—so that arrangements neither feel too transactional nor too intimate—as well as the role that affect plays in differentiating sugar dating from illicit sexual transactions. It also contributes to the literature on sugar dating and sex work by critically discussing the limits of the commodification of intimate services and affect under a dominant belief system that rejects the possibility of selling “real” intimacy.

This article is an introduction to the themed section titled, “Viviana A. Zelizer: Sociologist of the Family and Intimacy.” It first reviews the major works of Viviana Zelizer and their significance for the social studies of families and intimacy, underscoring how she has accounted for the interplay between family and economy through a series of objects: life insurance, the assessment of children's value, the social meaning of money, and, more recently, intimacy. The second part of the article describes extensions of Zelizer's work in the fields of family and intimacy studies and presents the four articles featured in the themed section.

This article is based on 21 interviews in an Atlantic Canadian city with people who identified as having few or no friends. With all the talk of a modern loneliness epidemic, we might easily assume friendless people are lonely, yet here we take an interpretive approach to analyze how they alternately claim to experience and not experience loneliness. We argue that claims to loneliness or its absence are never merely personal stories or problems of individual health or wellbeing, but are shaped by larger cultural resources and meanings. We found that friendless people both lament and celebrate their disconnection, a duality that we theorize through competing views of the modern self as both autonomous/self-reliant and fundamentally in need of connection and community. We show how our interviewees struggle to find meaning in their disconnection and self-respect in a society where being friendless is open to stigma or pity.

This study provides a content and frame analysis of the news media advocacy of prominent environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) in Canada. We find that these organizations have an important voice in shaping how climate change is framed in news media, but that ecological modernization frames and narratives, which avoid issues of power, conflict, and social-transformative change, are dominant. Core elements of this discourse are contested, however, as some ENGOs oppose the fossil sector, critique the shortcomings of proffered (technological) climate solutions, and call for muscular interventions aimed at energy transition. We also find that environmental justice frames - particularly those focused on Indigenous rights - are gaining traction, revealing a promising pathway of influence for ENGOs focused on climate justice.

This study examines whether social trust, the general belief that most people are honest and trustworthy, shapes perceptions of personal increases in cost of living and whether perceptions of increases in cost of living affect social trust. We analyze panel data from the Canadian Quality of Work and Economic Life Study (N = 2353) that was gathered between the fall of 2021 and spring of 2022, when inflation rose precipitously in Canada. Using a combination of entropy balancing and logistic regression, we estimate a statistically significant but weak causal effect of social trust on the perception of an increase in cost of living. The estimated causal effect of subjective inflation on declining trust is substantially larger. Additionally, financial strain does not moderate either estimated causal effect. In conclusion, rising inflation appears to not only threaten economic security-inflation also appears to harm the social fabric by depleting social trust.

Artists-entrepreneurs struggle with the tension between their artistic and entrepreneurial values. Previous research on this tension focuses on urban creative hubs and shows the presence of politicians to create, with the artists, a structure constituted of investment formulas to ease this tension. Based on Boltanski and Thévenot's On Justification theory, our research focuses on the case of artist-entrepreneurs located outside Canada's creative hubs. The tension between artistic and entrepreneurial values is expressed as a tension between the inspired and market worlds, which is managed through the civic world in Canadian creative hubs. The results of 50 semi-structured interviews with non-urban Canadian artist-entrepreneurs reveal that politicians are less implicated in these regional cultural industries. In order to manage the tension between artistic and entrepreneurial values, artists themselves are developing individual and collective investment formulas to create structure in the cultural industries that compensates for the low-level of involvement by politicians. Thus, we identify that the tension between the inspired and market worlds is managed through the presence of the projective world in the case of Canada's non-urban artist-entrepreneurs.

In the 40 years since federal employment equity initiatives were launched in Canada, they have faced persistent backlash. This backlash is grounded in and fueled by conceptualizations of justice and equality that are rooted in ideologies of individualism and meritocracy. Here we draw on 140 qualitative interviews with members of six professions from across Canada, who self-identify as Indigenous, Black or racialized, ethnic minority, disabled, 2SLGBTQ+, and/or from working-class origins, to explore tensions between concepts of justice grounded in group-based oppressions and those grounded in individual egalitarianism. Though affirmative action and employment equity opened up opportunities, people were still left to fight for individual rights. This push to individualism was intensified by persistent hostile misperceptions that people are less qualified and in receipt of ‘unfair advantages.’ Through discursive misdirection, potential for transformative institutional change is undermined by liberal discourses of individualism and meritocracy.